Recently, consumers have expressed significant interest in “place shifting” devices that allow viewing of television or other media content at locations other than their primary television set. Place shifting devices typically packetize media content that can be transmitted over a local or wide area network to a portable computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistant, remote television or other remote device capable of playing back the packetized media stream for the viewer. Placeshifting therefore allows consumers to view their media content from remote locations such as other rooms, hotels, offices, and/or any other locations where portable media player devices can gain access to a wireless or other communications network.
In the context of media streaming, including for example conventional general purpose computers running software for streaming placeshifted media, it is desirable to allow a user to seek within the media time buffer to find a particular scene or time slot, and then continue viewing the media from that point. The user interface for such a seeking operation typically allows a user to move (or “scrub”) an icon such as a play-head icon across a visual representation of a timeline associated with the media. In response, the software then goes to the nearest keyframe, decodes and drops all frames until it reaches the desired position (i.e., time), then displays the correct frame.
Such a system is undesirable in that the process of decoding and dropping frames can take a significant amount of time from the user's point of view, particularly when keyframes are widely spaced (e.g., on the order of five seconds apart). As a result, the user is not given active feedback when scrubbing the icon along the timeline, and the resulting user interface lacks responsiveness.
It is therefore desirable to create systems and methods for seeking a media stream buffer in a way that is responsive, intuitive, and provides useful real-time information to the user. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.